When planning a vacation or a business trip, many users use travel web sites that provide information about multiple hotels to make a reservation. One problem that needs to be addressed by travel web sites is providing up-to-date and accurate hotel information to users so that users are able to find the best current deals. If a user uses multiple travel web sites to find great deals in a particular city and one of the travel web sites consistently provides the best options, then the user is less likely to frequent the other travel web sites. If a travel web site informs a user about a possible reservation for a first price at a hotel when the hotel is only offering reservations at a second price that is higher than the first price, then the user becomes frustrated and is less likely to use the travel web site in planning future trips.
Another problem that needs to be addressed by travel web sites is managing the large amount of hotel information that must be retrieved on a daily, and sometimes more frequent, basis. One way to address this problem is to purchase or lease significant amount of computer resources, specifically, processors, network and disk I/O, caches, and data storage.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.